Each new hour holds new chances
For a new beginning.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning: The Inaugural Poem (New York: Random House, 1993)
What’s one small improvement you can make in your life?
I’ve been noticing how my work/ being has been reactive. There’s been a sense of scarcity and time urgency that’s been guiding my thoughts and actions. There’s been a hopelessness. Because some incidents are out of my control but which have impacted me. There’s been feelings of not being appreciated, feeling a lack of trust and working without purpose, moving away from my core values and moral compass.
I might have been using food or drink to numb my way through the shit. Through the ‘work’, not allowing myself to feel and be present. Really present to all the feels.
Do you feel me?
I know I need to take a step back and really look at the life I’ve been living. This is the only life I have and cannot be relived. I have a deep desire to change the system. To abolish the system and live otherwise.
And yet in order to change the system, I have to change my life, how I live my life. The way / how I live has to reflect the way/ how I want the world to be.
What does this mean in reality?
How I am just as much as what I do within the system will have an effect on system change. I have to be living my life with intention and purpose. Making sure I’m living my values, that I’m not compromising my integrity. That each decision I make is coming from that place of love and trust and hope.
That I’m not shutting down but open to togetherness but also trusting my gut that when I say ‘no’ it’s not from a place of malice but from a place of capacity and boundaries.
I’m learning, I’m sharing and I’m growing. Alone and in collaboration.
And I’m feeling and shifting into the practice and recognition that this is coming from a place of love and care rather than exhaustion and pain.
Small steps. Small acts. Small makes up the large. Small scales up to large.
I’ve got to be practicing the world I want to see now in my own life. Daily. Practice.
Love not hate.
Cooperation not competition.
Conversation rather than condemnation.
More care less harm.
More listening less violence.
The turn towards Mother Nature rather than against her.
A recognition in the value and worth of every human being regardless of race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, sexuality, body type and body and mind abilities.
From The Peoples Wants come a book that I invite you all to read. Alone and in group, reading and discussing together as we learn about revolutionary strategies for doing the work now to bring about structural change. How we can work together to make this happen.
You can obtain free copies of this book here and in different languages.
I’m reading it now if anyone wants to join me in discussions about it, just get in touch.
Every vision is also a map. As freedom fighter Kwame Ture taught us, “When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.”
Quoted in ‘So you’re thinking of becoming an abolitionist?’ By Mariame Kaba
Is it only Wednesday? What a week already and it’s only Wednesday.
Walking down the street, shooting the breeze and sun with June . I ask her, how come her words are so profound?
She nods and smiles.
It’s the living who keep the dead alive. It’s the living who keep the dead alive. They come alive when their words come through our mouths.
And on the other side Black girls are free – wherever/whatever that may be.
I wish I was on that Other side as this side sure is a lot to carry. A lot for one to carry. I moan. I whinge okay, girl’s got to let it out somehow.
Burdens, trauma, mournings and death are not supposed to be carried alone.
Sharing the pain, easing the pain. In community. I want me some of that.
Is it only Wednesday? My life, this week has been hard already and too much to bear alone.
after Ron Mueck
Here is a mass
of white upon white
skulls, tumbling
everywhere upon the galleries’ floor
a turning sea, resting
biting into another
black holes
shadowed sockets
promising questions without answers
a warning? a threat?
what remains long after our bodies have decayed
an impressive 100 skulls,
dwarfing visitors as they loom
here and here, cool, corridors
as catacombs above ground
forcing us to face our mortality, yes,
but also a certain care is needed in life for each other. Yes?
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
Sweeping violins. A Southern Belle, pretty and shallow, chatters on as young men flock around her feet, captive. *Fiddle de de.* Relishing in colour, technicolor; rich reds, blues and greens of the gallant Old South. Pan out see mansions surrounding by plantations. Bonnets and ribbons. Dances and horses. Cotton.
Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind
Found poem:
Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind
I first read Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell while completing an extra year at college. Gaining extra ‘A’ levels while I waited on my then boyfriend to make the grades.
I identified with Scarlett O’Hara, the bitch of a heroine, not Mammy. I definitely was no mammy. Not here to fetch and clean and be loyal. I definitely was not obese and coarse and ugly, or ‘have a shiny, glossy face of contentment as she be the most happy slave alive.’
Of course as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned where I’m placed in society. It’s okay to fantasise being the white heroine but I’ll never really be her. Better learn my place – to be there for the pleasure and enjoyment and whim of the white folk – and smile.
But what about my own pleasures and pains? Apparently they don’t exist. Apparently I’m incapable of such things, such finer characteristics. My reality states/shows otherwise.
It’s quitting time. I’m retreating into the woods in Aberdeenshire for the next week. I’m taking this opportunity as a reset. A chance to focus on my pleasures and pains. Drink on Mother Nature and give thanks for this life I have which isn’t being subservient/ submissive/ subjection to anybody.
I refuse the Mammy as well as the Scarlett, as they are both constructions and constrictions to control the female body.
I’m much more interested in the overspill, the excess, the unruly body. The blackwoman body that I live with/in daily and how nature supports me on this journey.
As a wind of flames sweeps through Georgia; menacing reds and oranges against a bleak dark sky swirl and crackle in time with fast ascending music. Real danger and Butterfly McQueen (real name not character name that would be Missy) flits around like a blue arsed fly worrying with no sense or plan.
Extract from: The Melodrama of Gone With The Wind
Found poem:
Source: http://www.art21.org/texts/kara-walker/interview-kara-walker-the-melodrama-of-gone-with-the-wind
I’m no Missy either.
In the time it takes me to write this sentence,
my mum must have lost her capacity to breathe.
Quick and unexpected, her passing.
Here one day and then gone the next.
I’m keeping close to the bone as the wound is raw,
27 years later.
Up until now, there’s been a balance –
the years I had her with me versus the years without.
Loss constitutes a black mother’s life, but what about their daughters?
Mourning in the early morning, when the news found me,
sleepless and fearful, until this Autumn when I will have to learn
how to navigate this life beyond without.
Loss splits time into the before and after.
A rupture fires the heart, triggers
the already-always -thereness of loss,
the always-already-thereness of the ghosts
we carry with us into our many battles
and violent (work)spaces.
I’ve been coming later and later to my creative sketchbook practice this month.
It’s day 123. 123 days since I started this practice of play within my creative sketchbook. Daily.
This piece tonight is significant because it chimes with my word of the year/ focus of the year being AFROSURREAL.
The right now. Capturing the now.
AFROSURREAL has been bubbling below the surface all year so far. I’m thinking it’s about time to share my musings and thinkings here in a mini series of posts.
Everything is overlapping and I’m fixing to gain some clarity knowing fine well that the practice of writing it out will only throw up more questions than answers.
The Matterings of (ordinary) Black Life is the practice. The push back against the colonial, historical categorisation of black people as subhuman. As stereotype as no life beyond the construct.
Right now. Black life. Black aliveness.
I’m living a/my reality which isn’t acknowledged or if is then it’s challenged/ denied/ erased.
It’s important to storytell, mythmake, historicise and archive within these liminal spaces. Centre the margins where these matterings happen.
Through the reconstruction and recalibration, healing and reparative processes challenge the exclusions and colonial impulses to conquer, control and exploit.
Expect to read more around AFROSURREAL and the overlaps with my other obsessions as through my research and readings and writings, I attempt to come to some understanding of myself and my creativity, moving backward and forwards between the now and beyond.
Living Wild Studios 